groans of its despair.

Talmage's boldest step on the line which separates the ludicrous from
the sublime occurs in his peroration. He makes General Joshua conquer
Death by lying down and giving up the ghost, and then asks for a
headstone and a foot-stone for the holy corpse. "I imagine," he says,
"that for the head it shall be the sun that stood still upon Gibeon, and
for the foot the moon that stood still in the valley of Ajalon." This
is about the finest piece of Yankee buncombe extant. If the sun and moon
keep watch over General Joshua's grave, what are we to do? When we get
to the New Jerusalem we shall want neither of these luminaries, for the
glory of the Lord will shine upon us. But until then we cannot dispense
with them, and we decidedly object to their being retained as perpetual
mourners over Joshua's grave. If, however, one of them must do service,
we humbly beg that it may be the moon. Let the sun illumine us by day,
so that we may see to transact our affairs. And if ever we should long
to behold "pale Dians beams" again, we might take Talmage as our guide
to the unknown grave of General Joshua, and while they played softly
over the miraculous two yards of turf we should see his fitting
epitaph--Moonshine.

GOING TO HELL.

(June, 1882.)

Editing a Freethought paper is a dreadful business. It brings one into
contact with many half-baked people who have little patent recipes
for hastening the millennium; with ambitious versifiers who think it
a disgrace to journalism that their productions are not instantly
inserted; with discontented ladies and gentlemen who fancy that a
heterodox paper is the proper vehicle for every species of complaint;
and with a multitude of other bores too numerous to mention and too
various to classify. But the worst of all are the anonymous bores,
who send their insults, advice, or warnings, through the post for
the benefit of the Queen's revenue. We generally pitch their puerile
missives into the waste-paper basket; but occasionally we find one
diverting enough to be introduced to our readers. A few days ago we
received the following lugubrious epistle, ostensibly from a parson in
Worcestershire, as the envelope bore the postmark of Tything.

"The fool hath said in his heart 'there is no God'--I have seen one
of your blasphemous papers; and I say solemnly, as a clergyman of the
Church of England, that I believe you are doing the work of the Devil,
and are on the r